Some links and readings posted by Gary B. Rollman, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Western Ontario

Friday, May 20, 2016

The Plan to Avert Our Post-Antibiotic Apocalypse - The Atlantic

Under instructions from U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, economist Jim O'Neill has spent the last two years looking into the problem of drug-resistant infections—bacteria and other microbes that have become impervious to antibiotics. In that time, he estimates that a million people have died from such infections. By 2050, he thinks that ten million will die every year.

O'Neill is most famous for another prediction—that by 2050, the combined economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC), would eclipse those of the world's current richest countries. A former chairman of Goldman Sachs with no scientific training, he was an unorthodox choice to lead an international commission on drug-resistant infections. He was also an inspired one. The problem of drug-resistant microbes isn't just about biology and chemistry; it's an economic problem at heart, a catastrophic and long-bubbling mismatch between supply and demand. It's the result of the many incentives for misusing our drugs, and the dearth of incentives for developing new ones.